'This is not the death of the Gulf,' biologist says of oil spill

Scientists say anywhere from 1.47 to 2.52 million gallons of oil is gushing from the Deepwater Horizon well every day.

With 140 million gallons spilled, the leak is inarguably a catastrophic threat to the north-central section of the Gulf of Mexico. Still, the Gulf is the ninth-largest body of water in the world.

View full size(AP Photo/BP PLC)This image from video provided by BP PLC early Thursday morning, June 10, 2010, shows oil continuing to pour out at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Using liberal estimates, it would take the spill more than 700 million years to equal the amount of water in the Gulf, about 650 quadrillion gallons.

"This is not the death of the Gulf of Mexico," said George Crozier, director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. "If you went Gulf-wide with this and stirred it up in the Gulf of Mexico, I'm not sure we could find it."

Crozier pointed out that the Gulf Coast will almost certainly see a greater financial impact than ecological one. Oil evaporates, degenerates and sinks as it sloshes around with currents.

"It is going to be the economic death of a lot of human endeavor that is tied to the resource base of the Gulf," Crozier said. "Beaches next year should be just fine, but they may be serving pot roast instead of Gulf snapper. ... The ecosystem is a lot healthier and more resilient than the human system."

In order to better grasp the scope of the leak, marine biologists at the Sea Lab put together some size analogies.

So far, using conservative estimates, at least 126 Olympic-sized swimming pools could have been filled with all the leaking oil, according to Ron Kiene, professor of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama and the Sea Lab. Using larger estimates, that figure jumps to 216 pools.

By comparison, the water in the Gulf would fill up 1.1 trillion Olympic-sized swimming pools.

It's difficult to estimate the volume of water affected by the spill, Crozier said, because the slick continues to shift, and underwater plumes cannot be seen from the surface.

"We don't really know how much oil or carbon has been injected, no matter where it is," Crozier said.

Kiene performed the swimming pool math not to make light of the current spill, he said, but simply to wrap his head around these astronomical figures.

"For me, it helps to imagine what this volume of oil might look like," Kiene said. "Everybody needs that kind of thing. You put out those big numbers and nobody can relate to those numbers."

He estimated that, on the low end, the total oil leaked would equal about 0.017 percent of the 3.2 billion cubic meters of Mobile Bay. He also calculated that the spill would amount to between 10 and 17 percent of the daily use of oil in the United States.

When measured up with other oil spills, however, this is perhaps the third largest on record. And BP PLC Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward said last week that the reservoir contains 2 billion gallons of oil, so the Gulf spill has plenty of room to worsen.

The land-based 1910-11 spill of Lakeview Gusher Number One in California, which is regarded by many experts as the biggest ever, leaked an estimated 9 million barrels -- or 378 million gallons -- of oil in 18 months.

In two months, the Deepwater Horizon leak has reached nearly a third of that amount, by some estimates. By Friday, however, it could have reached the same level of the 1979 Ixtoc 1 spill, which spewed roughly 138 million gallons of oil in Mexico's Bay of Campeche.

The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 leaked 10.8 million gallons of crude. The Deepwater spill is already 13 times that, by most calculations.

A 1991 spill during the Gulf War dumped between 231 million and 462 million gallons.